Welcome to

Metaphors for the People: A Presentation Exploring The Métis and the History of Minnesota

The Background and the Presenter:

Bones, marrow, blood. Genes and chromosomes. Amino acids and sunlight. Dead
matter leaping to life. Life leaping to consciousness. From time to time we learn who and
what we are. Some small piece of the idiosyncracy that is identity is illuminated by light
reflecting off water flowing from the heart of an unknown world. In canoe country, I feel this
sense of connection, wondering how it was when first we came, or perhaps before they
came. The country is in my blood. And my course on the "Frontier Heritage" becomes
more and more an exploration of the mysterious mosaic of ethnic and racial realities and
myths that makes us Americans. For me, teaching the course has become an exploration
of the mysterious mosaic within myself, as well as a discovery of the history that is in each
of us.

For years I've known how being Genovese, being Tomaso Carlo Bacigalupo's son,
burning to know, aflame to achieve, made this third generation Dago a student of the
humanities, a dreamer of perfection. Recently, I've begun to guess that being Gertrude
Lillian Durand's son, is making this 12th generation Canuck-Canuck a crafter of words, a
maker of tight-mitered word corners. She is a cabinet maker's daughter. When they
needed someone to hang a perfect door, they called Joe Durand, even when he was
seventy. I saw him set and sharpen a crosscut saw with pliers and a flat file at age 73,
sighting and shaving bent and rounded steel into perfect points and alignment. His own
saws were toledo steel and he bent them tip to heel and let them spring back to show us
what good tools meant. He kicked my ass and laughed when, at twelve, I tried to put
trowel to wall after watching him for half a day. Now watch close, and next time do it
right, he said. He was a tyrant, and a master craftsman. What made him, what made my
mother, is making me. As a teacher of the humanities hoping to understand the difference
between our dreams of perfection and our realities, and a writer trying to frame the
sentences that build word homes for all the people of the world, I seek to explore the
frontiers of our pasts for the sake of our future.

On September 23, 1662, Jean Durand, a peasant from the town of Doeuil in the
province of Saintonge, having completed his three year contract to earn his way to New
France, took to wife Catherine Annennontak, daughter of the late Nicolas Arendankir
captain of the Hurons of Georgian Bay. In 1658, she fled her fathers death and the
annihilation of the Huron nation by Iroquois armed with Dutch and English muskets. The
orphan and 200 other women and children were led to Quebec by the Jesuit missionaries
who had been converting them. She was reared and taught in the French manner"
by Madam de la Peltrie and Marie de l'Incarnation at the Ursuline convent in Quebec, so
that she "could someday marry a Frenchman." The Jesuits of Canada dowried her for
marrying her frenchman, giving 350 livres to the newlyweds. She was fourteen years old.

And from this blood and bone, from these genes and chromosomes, from the
policies of Champlain and the Recollets and Jesuits, of church and state, spring 12
generations of people of mixed blood. Mixed offspring married mixed offspring, and in
Quebec no one kept track. In the west, moving up the lakes they were called bois brûlé,
"burnt wood," coureurs de bois, "woods runners," voyaguers, "canoemen." Catherine and
Jeans son, Louis was among the first to go. As these fur traders moved west to the
plains, spreading from the Missouri basin to the Arctic, they came to see themselves as
people apart, as the Métis , the mixed..

The Indians, Voyageurs, Fur Traders, and the Métis

Who Were the People?

All of these materials on the First Nations peoples are drawn from a remarkable web project being done by Lee Sultzman. He descibes it as follows:

A classification, about 240 compact tribal histories (contact to 1900). It is limited to the lower 48 statesof the U.S. but also includes those First Nations from Canada and Mexico that had important roles ( Huron, Assiniboine, etc.).

He introduces each section in the following way:

This history's content and style are representative. The normal process at this point is to circulate an almost finished product among a peer group for
comment and criticism. At the end of this History you will find links to those Nations referred to in the History of the (tribal name).
Using the Internet, this can be more inclusive. Feel free to comment or suggest corrections via e-mail. Working together we can end some of the
historical misinformation about Native Americans. You will find the ego at this end to be of standard size. Thanks for stopping by. I look forward to
your comments... Lee Sultzman.

It was this advantage in transport and trade which first aroused the interest of the French in the Huron. The fur trade, reinforced later by Jesuit
missions, blossomed into a political and cultural alliance that endured beyond the defeat and dispersal of the Huron by the Iroquois. The Huron did
disappear in 1649, but survived to become the Wyandot. Allied with the Ottawa, they became the "eldest children" of Onontio (French governor of
Canada) and the cornerstone of the French alliance with the Great Lakes Algonquin. Within this organization, the Wyandot were regarded as
something akin to a "founding father" with important links, through their adopted Huron relatives, to the Iroquois League. Even after the French
defeat in 1763, the Wyandot commanded a respect and influence among the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley tribes far greater than the number of their
warriors would have suggested.

Along with the Ojibwe and Potawatami, the Ottawa first arrived on the east side of Lake Huron sometime around 1400. While the Ojibwe and
Potawatomi continued west towards Sault Ste. Marie, the Ottawa remained near the mouth of the French River and on the large Islands in Lake
Huron. Over the years. the Ottawa lived in many places but always considered Manitoulin Island as their original homeland. This island was on the
route between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic coast, and the Ottawa used the birchbark canoes to travel great distances for trade. In 1615 their
villages were concentrated on Manitoulin Island, but they began relocating to Mackinac (upper Michigan) during the 1630s. By 1649 they had left
Manitoulin Island. Iroquois attacks forced them to move to Green Bay (Wisconsin) in 1651 and then to the south shore of Lake Superior in 1658.
They remained there until they returned to Mackinac in 1670. As the French and their allies drove the Iroquois from the Great Lakes during the
1690s, some Ottawa returned to Manitoulin Island where they have remained ever since.
However, the majority stayed at Mackinac until 1701 when most left for Detroit and Saginaw Bay. They spread south into northern Ohio with one
village located as far east as Venango in western Pennsylvania. The Ottawa at Mackinac stayed until the soil wore out in 1741, and they relocated to
Grand Traverse Bay in lower Michigan, with some bands moving as far south on the east side of Lake Michigan at the Grand River. A few bands
settled on the opposite side of the lake at Milwaukee and spread into northern Illinois. The Wisconsin and Illinois Ottawa were removed with the
Potawatomi to southwest Iowa in 1834. By 1846 they had merged with the Potawatomi and moved with them to Kansas. The Ohio and Detroit
bands of Ottawa were removed to Kansas 1831-34. Some chose allotment and citizenship in 1867 and remained in Kansas while the remainder
moved to northeast Oklahoma. However, the vast majority of the Ottawa were not removed and still live in the northern part of lower Michigan or
southern Ontario.

In a tradition shared with the Ottawa and Potawatomi, the Ojibwe remember a time when they lived near an ocean. This may have been the Atlantic
near the gulf of the St. Lawrence, but more likely it was Hudson Bay. Sometime around 1400, the North America climate became colder, and the first
Ojibwe, Ottawa and Potawatomi bands started to arrive on the east side of Lake Huron. The Ottawa remained at the mouth of the French River and
Lake Huron islands, but the Ojibwe and Potawatomi continued northwest occupying the shoreline to the Mackinac Strait which separates upper and
lower Michigan. By 1500 the Potawatomi had crossed into lower Michigan while the Ojibwe continued west to Lake Superior and Wisconsin's Apostle
Islands. When the French had their first meeting the Saulteur in 1623, the Ojibwe were concentrated in the eastern half of upper Michigan.
Through the fur trade and war, the Ojibwe after 1687 expanded to the east, south, and west. During their wars with the Iroquois, the Ojibwe
pushed down both sides of Lake Huron and by 1701 controlled most of lower Michigan and southern Ontario. Following the French fur trade west
during the 1720s, they moved beyond Lake Superior and into a war with the Dakota (Sioux) in 1737. During the next century, the Ojibwe forced
the Dakota out of northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. Reaching Manitoba and North Dakota during the late 1700s, some bands adopted the plains
lifestyle and continued west into Montana and Saskatchewan. At the same time, other Ojibwe moved south to settle in northern Illinois. By 1800
Ojibwe were living in Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Michigan, Minnesota, Michigan, North Dakota, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. No other tribe has
ever come close to controlling so vast an area as the Ojibwe did at this time. White settlement ultimately took most of their land and forced them
onto reservations, but with the exception of two small bands, the Ojibwe have remained in their homeland.
Canada recognizes more than 600 First Nations - more than 130 of which are Ojibwe (at least in part). These are located in Ontario, Manitoba,
Saskatchewan, and Alberta.
Names
In the United States, 22 Chippewa groups have federal recognition. To end any confusion, the Ojibwe and Chippewa are not only the same tribe, but the same word pronounced a little differently due to accent. If an
"O" is placed in front of Chippewa (O'chippewa), the relationship becomes apparent. Ojibwe is used in Canada, although Ojibwe west of Lake
Winnipeg are sometime referred to as the Saulteaux. In United States, Chippewa was used in all treaties and is the official name. The Ojibwe call
themselves Anishinabe (Anishinaubag, Neshnabek) meaning "original men" (sometimes shortened to Shinob and used as a nickname among
themselves). Ottawa and Potawatomi also call themselves Anishinabe, and at some time in the past, the three tribes were a single tribe. Ojibwe, or
Chippewa, comes from the Algonquin word "otchipwa" (to pucker) and refers to the distinctive puckered seam of Ojibwe moccasins. Various
spellings: Achipoes, Chepeway, Chippeway, Ochipoy, Odjibwa, Ojibweg, Ojibwey, Ojibwa, and Otchipwe.
Some major Ojibwe had specific names according to location:
Missisauga in southern Ontario; Salteaux of upper Michigan; and Bungee for the Ojibwe of the northern Great Plains. Other names: Aoechisaeronon
(Huron), Assisagigroone (Iroquois), Axshissayerunu, (Wyandot), Bawichtigouek (French), Bedzaqetcha (Tsattine), Bedzietcho (Kawchodinne),
Bungee (Plains Ojibwe, Plains Chippewa) (Hudson Bay), Dewakanha (Mohawk), Dshipowehaga (Caughnawaga), Dwakanen (Onondaga),
Eskiaeronnon (Huron), Hahatonwan (Dakota), Hahatonway (Hidatsa), Jumper, Kutaki (Fox), Leaper, Neayaog (Cree), Nwaka (Tuscarora),
Ostiagahoroone (Iroquois), Paouichtigouin (French), Rabbit People (Plains Cree), Regatci (Negatce) (Winnebago), Saulteur (Saulteaux) (French), Sore
Face (Hunkpapa Lakota), Sotoe (British), and Wahkahtowah (Assiniboine).

Who Were the Voyageurs

Who Did the Voyageurs Become

The Métis were not only of mixed blood but of mixed
culture and their lifestyle depended upon the river, the hunt, the fur
trade and a pattern of primitive agriculture suited to a semi-settled
people. Their life style was midway between that of the nomadic Indian
food gatherers and that of the Europeans, the economic base of which was
agriculture.

. . . These Métis are the true Natives of Canada.
Indians and Europeans were immigrants -- only the millennia separated
their penetration into the New World. The meeting of the two races
produced a mixture which was not from another land, but whose sole roots
were in the New World. ( Sealey and Lussier, 1975, p. 9)

So the Métis of Canada have come to see themselves.
But how did the dominant Anglo cultures of the United States and Canada
view people of mixed blood? The answer to that question varies over time,
but it ends where most questions about the preservation of "native"
cultures in the Americas have ended; in the fight to maintain some sense
of identity, some connection with tradition, some sense of what the elders
have to say in the face of every kind of pressure to capitulate to the
dominant cultures. The case of the Métis is especially
difficult because neither the dominant cultures nor the native cultures
wanted the Métis to endure or prevail. Additionally, the
Métis' connections to French Catholic culture further
alienated this people from Anglo Protestant culture.

Robert Thomas, Head of American Indian Studies at the University of
Arizona, poses he issue nicely in his after word to Peterson and Brown's
The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis.

"The question of identity (is) in a very broad and simplistic
sense, the answer to the question, 'Who am I?', or, on the level of the
group, the answer to the question 'Who are we?' ... if one ponders the
enormity of the answers to those questions one can see that he or she has
stepped into a profound sphere of human life. Individuals, no matter how
sophisticated, cannot explicitly answer about themselves...(or)...their
"people." Such questions are too all encompassing. No human being is
that self-aware."

In exploring such questions about identity historians are now arguing
that to come to real understandings of the ways in which the frontier
experience shaped the characters of North Americans, we will have to turn
away from Turner and Roosevelt's construction of the past as the drama of
"manifest destiny" and spend more time studying the portrayals of the
experiences of specific groups in specific frontier locales.

Lyle Dick, for example, in " The Seven Oaks Incident and The
construction of a Historical Tradition, 1816-1970" explores the way
history and myth are made. He raises fundamental questions about
"objective" history, questions which are based on the careful analysis of
the way in which amateur historians and professional historians portray
the Métis people of Canada. He points out that in contrast to
nineteenth century amateurs' preservation of competing interpretations of
both the people and events at Seven Oaks, professional historians pictured
the Métis "as the inherently flawed product of an unsound racial
mixture." He concludes that the "transformation of Seven Oaks
historiography from Red River pluralism to Anglo Canadian romance ... to
myth" has become "ideological bedrock, ... stubbornly resistant to
revision."

Finally, attempts to understand the role played in forming "national
character, aboriginal and non-Anglo European groups like the Métis
and Metisto suffer from the Anglophone bias that characterizes most
histories of North America. That history is, in the main, a tale told by
the "victors" which gives short shrift to the perspectives of Native
Americans, Spaniards and Frenchmen, let alone groups of mixed languages
and cultures. Peter Charlebois summarizes this situation in the
introduction to his Life of Louis Riel.

"Canadians have easy access only to English-language books and
newspapers of those times. Newspaper accounts of the battles were written
to sell newspapers. History textbooks to this day start with the false
premise that it was the white settlers who had the right to the land. ...
Some of the books on these events have been written so as not to offend
anyone: others frankly promote racial, religious and national prejudices.
More recently, scholarly works treat all events and people equally, on the
false premise that one may write without presuppositions, trying so hard
to be fair that they are unfair. The facts of life and history are that
all people and events are not of equal importance, that people do things
for reasons and most often aren't afraid to say what they are."

Charlebois is a least partially right. We do need to consider the way
in which the stories we tell and told about the experiences of the
pioneers and the natives, reveal the under stories of racism, imperialism,
and nationalism that are the legacy of European settlement in North
America. However, attempts to redress the imbalance of the
self-congratulatory boosterism, and unabashed racism and imperialism of
Turner's thesis, have their own limitations if all they produce is
narrowly focused empirical studies of marriage patterns or trade
arrangements in frontier communities. It is too easy to slip into views
of people and events which are atomistic, and which while they give a
clearer sense of the economic causes of events, or of the cross cultural
similarities in the experiences of indigenous people as they are exploited
or overrun, mask the common ground of the lessons of freedom taught and
learned by and from the land and the people as they came together. Here,
though deeply flawed by his underlying racist genetic theory, Marcel
Giraud's two volume The Métis in the Canadian West (1986),
comes closer to the truth in portraying the emergence of the Métis
on the fur frontier .

"From among these individuals who henceforth were dedicated to the
primitive existence, a new class of men emerged in the West which, under
the name of 'gens libres', 'hommes libres', or
'freemen,' established between white and native the last and most complete
link in their unification. Nearer to the Indian than to the employee in
the post, more intimately associated with his nomadic ways, the freeman
let himself be absorbed irrevocably into the country where the
voyageurs were often content with temporary residence. He even
developed confused aspirations of local patriotism of which the first
settlers in Manitoba would soon experience the effects. To the regions in
which he wandered, surviving by his own resources, independent of the
trading companies, he was attached not only by the modalities of his
existence, but also by the Métis family he had created, by the
blood relationships that united him with the native tribes, and finally by
the nature of the country whose majestic spaces or wooded horizons he had
come to love."(p. 264-65)